CEM - King Customer
Customer Experience Management (CEM) is a crucial process for mobile network operators and 
communication service providers in general. It places the customer at the centre of a converging communications environment, finally recognising that it is the end-users’ response to their experience of the network and its services that will ultimately drive the success or failure of any network brand. James Doyle discusses the emergence of CEM as a crucial application, and why it is now an essential complementary part of CRM/BSS/OSS processes
Is Customer Experience Management (CEM) just another three-letter acronym added to a growing list, or does it represent a new approach to delivering value within the OSS/BSS landscape? This is a common question passing across the lips of those who bump up against CEM for the first time.
CEM has traditionally been viewed by management consultants and analysts more as a business and marketing philosophy rather than a real technology or application delivering tangible value. However, CEM implementations through real software solutions across the globe are on the increase and are producing real results for new revenue generation, lower churn rates and greater customer satisfaction amongst many MNOs. CEM systems are able to build top-down models to define customer experience and measure experience indicators in transaction-orientated networks in near real time against those models. This allows any customer’s experience of service consumption to be viewed by the CSP and through such measurement experience ‘gaps’ can be identified and customers proactively managed, as a result. This, in turn, reveals: customer satisfaction, churn potential, lost revenue/potential revenues, brand damage, negative and positive advocacy and a customer-centric experience view of your business.
CEM’s differentiating qualities
So, how different is CEM to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Service Quality Management (SQM)? The difference is subtle but very significant and requires approaching the problem from the customer’s point of view. Firstly, CEM delivers a customer experience view of every point of interaction the customer has with a CSP’s business and operational platforms, e.g. service usage, billing, customer care. We call these the customer touchpoints; secondly, it delivers a complete view of a customer experience and their problems direct to the desktop of the relevant stakeholder or workflow process within the business, so immediate action or feedback can be taken to improve that experience, e.g. closing the loop.
CEM is, therefore, more of a horizontal, iterative way of providing experience feedback to the entire business, whereas the other approaches are vertical methods of understanding the operation of assets within each silo; SQM delivers a service view rather than a customer or business view, and CRM data limitations mean a real-time, actual customer-experience view cannot be extracted.
Using the customer as the central reference point of your value delivery and service experience provides a more holistic and better way of managing and running a business, especially in terms of technology and service integration (e.g. convergence). Why rely solely on standard OSS and BSS silos, with systems to measure each silo (sometimes per technology), when you can use the customer to pull this data together to provide a more complete picture?
Such views are supported in independent research by Allen, Reichheld and Hamilton in the Oct 2005 Harvard Business Newsletter Management Update. Their paper, entitled: Tuning Into The Voice of Your Customer, clearly demonstrates that, by simple measurement, the positive and negative advocacy of its customers provide a clear indication as to the growth potential of a business. Full CEM systems act as a key feedback mechanism to deliver against this theory.
Closing the gap
In terms of aiding speed of response to customer needs, CEM is one of the most efficient and proactive ways an operator has of closing the gap between measuring a poor performance and enacting change to solve the problem. Other OSS and BSS systems just do not ’see‘ the actual customers behaviour so clearly. CEM can also be applied to traditional BSS areas like customer care and CRM, which is a key part of Arantech’s solution strategy and what the company, in turn, believes should become an overall industry strategy. The company sees three CEM elements as crucial: First CEM – that is providing rich, customer-centric data early to the company, especially key stakeholders like executives, customer care and account teams; Proactive CEM – this is about taking action before the customer has raised a problem and can be seen as managing against the positive and negative advocacy of your customer base; and Next Best Action CEM – this is about applying business logic rules to a combined CEM and CRM data set to provide a simple set of next best actions for the operator to improve the business process.
A proactive customer-management strategy executed through, say, customer care activities, can deliver a much needed proactive first line of care, and much less of a reactive, cost-based process. By being more proactive, an operator’s process will become more revenue focused and less cost focussed. And if one considers that most customer experience problems don’t even get reported to the customer care department, this proactive approach makes total sense in revenue and experience terms.
In the end, the only way of getting a customer-focused view is by going top down, customer-to-asset, and not bottom-up. This requires measuring all customers all of the time, in real time, enabling a CSP to look at how these customers are using and consuming both services and network basics.
In a network management or service management system tens of thousands of elements are being measured and managed. Whereas in a customer-centric solution tens of millions of customers and their experience are being managed; this is a key differentiator of CEM systems.
Currently, a significant number of operators and service providers are already applying the Arantech touchpoint CEM to their networks and are now able to monitor service delivery and usage through the eyes of their subscribers.
The future
The TM Forum has spent a significant time defining service management and turning that into a deployable technology. Taking a pure customer-centric approach and turning that into a deployable technology has, until now, only been pursued comprehensively by one company, Arantech, currently the thought leader and pioneer of this space. However over the last 18 months CEM has started to become a real market opportunity, which is attracting more vendors to the CEM approach.
CEM, as both a business process and a best practice discipline for any operator, is beginning to both catalyse and enable a cultural change process across the mobile industry. It is helping CSPs review the whole way in which they do business and has already led a number of MNOs to change their workflows and processes to reap competitive and revenue advantages.
So, are the days of just measuring the performance of a network or service rapidly drawing to a close? Maybe the answer to that will revolve around whether current systems in use will ever be able to positively answer several key questions, in both real-time and historically, across all touchpoints at which the subscriber experiences the network and its services. These questions are:
• Can you segment, group and manage the service experience of the entire customer base dynamically?
• Can you identify who is trying to spend money but can’t?
• Can you identify which customers are having a good or bad experience across all operational and business platforms?
• Can you identify what services are being consumed by which customers or device?
• Can you identify which of your network assets are the most effective at delivering business value and profit?
• Can you continually determine the positive and negative high-margin customers dynamically to ensure an action plan for high company growth?
If the system in use is a comprehensive CEM implementation, such questions will be answered in the affirmative on each count and more importantly delivered to the desktop of the key stakeholder or process responsible.
James Doyle is VP Marketing and Product Management with Arantech
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